A Study On The Acquisition Of English Temporal Expressions By College Students From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis(CTH),as a newly-introduced perspective of language transfer,predicts that the concepts and patterns of conceptualization that a person has acquired as a speaker of one language will have an effect on how the person uses another language.This hypothesis attempts to study language transfer from a cognitive level in order to further investigate the causes of cross-linguistic influence.At present,extensive studies focusing on the conceptual domains of object,time,space,and motion within the scope of conceptual transfer have been accomplished abroad.Prevailing domestic research on this theory has focused only on the conceptual domains of space and motion,while scarcely conducting studies involving the conceptual domain of time.Moreover,regarding the time domain,prepositions and conjunctions are two relevant items related to English temporal expressions.However,it is very rare to find studies that deal with the acquisition of temporal prepositions and temporal conjunctions from a conceptual transfer perspective.Based on the theory of spatiotemporal metaphors,this thesis investigates the acquisition of temporal prepositions and temporal conjunctions by college students,and analyzes the causes of errors from a conceptual transfer perspective,with the objective of providing suggestions for English teaching on temporal prepositions and temporal conjunctions.Here are specific research questions:(1)What are the characteristics and errors in the acquisition of temporal prepositions(at,on,in)and temporal conjunctions(before & after)?(2)Can errors in the acquisition of temporal prepositions and temporal conjunctions be explained from the perspective of conceptual transfer? In this study,data collection was accomplished through a sentence-completion test.The subjects were freshmen from China Three Gorges University,among whom 120 valid data were collected.All the data were put into computer and analyzed through SPSS.Descriptive analyses,paired-samples t tests,a one-way within-subject ANOVA and a chi-square goodness of fit test were performed to examine the acquisition of temporal prepositions and temporal conjunctions by college students.The results indicated that:(1)College students mastered the temporal meanings of the words at,on,and in quite well,but also committed errors in various ways as they tended to select and use improper temporal prepositions.(2)In their acquisition of temporal conjunctions,college students preferred to use after to guide temporal adverbial clauses in the expression of the event sequence,while only occasionally using before-clauses.The students were accustomed to placing after-and before-clauses preceding the main clauses.From a perspective of conceptual transfer,the mixed usage of temporal prepositions mainly resulted from discrepancies in conceptual categories of temporal prepositions between Chinese and English.The difficulties in the acquisition of before-and after-clauses were caused by discrepancies in time orientation between Chinese and English.Based on the above findings,this study suggests that English teachers should attach more importance to the cognitive discrepancies between Chinese and English in the teaching instructions relating to the temporal prepositions and conjunctions.Accordingly,teachers should strengthen students? understanding of the cognitive motivations behind the different forms to help students have a better mastery of the English temporal expressions.